The Creepy Cryptids from Appalachia You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

In July 2004, Dakota Cheeks and Ricky Joyce were hunting in a remote area of Breckinridge County, Kentucky, when they found one of their dogs dead. Based on the condition of her body, it was clear no normal predator had killed her: Her head was twisted completely around. They hopped on their four-wheelers, determined to scour the area for the creature responsible.

That first day, their search was fruitless. But on the second day, around dusk, they said they came across a massive figure “too big to be a person,” as Cheeks described it, in an open field just past a cemetery. It was at least nine feet tall with white fur and long talons. When it saw them, it let out an “ungodly gut curling growl” and charged them, sending them running for the safety of their cabin.

This might sound like a run-in with a particularly aggressive bigfoot. But while sasquatch encounters are common in Appalachia, Dakota and Ricky had come across a different local legend: the Sheepsquatch. Its portmanteau name reflects its appearance, combining the large, hairy, bipedal form of a sasquatch with the wooly white fur and curving horns of a sheep.

Where the White Things Are

Sheepsquatch is just one of many names given to a group of cryptids collectively referred to as White Things; other monikers for the creatures include White Devils and Devil Dogs. They’re consistently reported as having white fur, long claws, and sharp fangs. Beyond this, the details vary. They could be canine, feline, or hominid, with the latter variety often (though not always) having a pair of single-point horns.

Reports of White Things occur across Appalachia.  One early encounter out of West Virginia dates to July 1929, when miner Frank Kozul was walking home from work through the woods of Morgan’s Ridge. In the book The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales, Kozul’s daughter recounts how her father was attacked by a white-furred creature the size of a large dog with a huge head and tail. Kozul’s attempts to fight it off were futile, so he fled to the boundary of a nearby cemetery where the beast suddenly vanished. Kozul had felt the creature’s teeth and claws pierce his skin, but when he looked himself over, he didn’t have a single scratch.

Author Rosemary Guiley includes a similar incident in her book Monsters of West Virginia. In the late ’70s or early ’80s, group of men were deer hunting when the heard a scream “like a woman in agony.” Suddenly, a white thing leaped out of the brush, tackling one of the hunters down a hill. The beast had disappeared by the time his friends found him on his back, punching the air. Though he was unharmed, he insisted he had not only felt the animal bite him, but “had felt his entrails snapped out of his body.”

White Thing sightings are particularly prevalent in rural West Virginia, centering on the same area of Mason County that the more famous cryptid Mothman calls home. Another sighting included in Guiley’s book was reported in 1994 by former Navy seaman Ed Rollins. He’d been searching for Mothman along Bethel Church Road when he saw a large, white-furred beast with a doglike head and single-point horns. When it knelt by a creek to take a drink, it put out paws that looked like hands.

“I shrunk back into the brush and watched, afraid to stay and afraid to run,” Rollins would later write. “It drank for a few minutes, then cross the creek and continued on across toward Sandhill Road. When I was sure it was gone, I turned and ran as fast as I could back toward the pond where I’d parked.” He believed he’d encountered a sheepsquatch.

Beyond Appalachia

White Things are little known outside of Appalachia, but they have been reported in other areas. There have numerous sightings further south of a creature known as the White Thang of Alabama. The legend of this hairy white creature with sharp claws and a shrill cry goes back around 150 years in the Happy Hollow area. The most recently reported sighting dates from the early aughts when a camper in Guntersville State Park saw a creature they described as looking like a white tiger eating a deer.

There have been white thing sightings further north, too: In 2008, video of a white-furred cryptid—which would come to be dubbed the Pennsylvania White Bigfoot—was taken in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, and posted online (above).

Possible Origins of—or Explanations for—White Things

The many sightings of White Things over the years have fueled abundant speculation about their origin. One theory centers around the connection between Sheepsquatch and Marion County: The TNT Area where Rollins’s sighting occurred was contaminated by explosives byproducts from a World War II munitions plant. This pollution is one proposed origin of Mothman, and some attribute this background to the Sheepsquatch, too.

Other cryptozoologists believe that White Thing is an umbrella term for two totally different kinds of cryptids: one a hairy hominid with horns, the other a four-legged beast more similar to a cat, dog, or bear.

But more skeptical takes suggest a different kind of misidentification: Most of the sightings of White Things happen at night in isolated areas, where the combination of fear and the power of suggestion could lead to misinterpreting a rare, albino predator for something completely unknown.

While there are as many theories about the White Things as there are names for them, for the moment these creatures remain—like most cryptids—an elusive mystery.

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